Experimental study on buoyance-aided mixed convective heat transfer in an asymmetrically heated vertical channel

This paper studied the buoyance-aided mixed convective heat transfer of air-cooling flow in a 5 m long and 1.2mX0.3 m cross-section vertical channel. One of the channel walls was uniformly heated and the rest three walls were unheated and insulated. Heat was transferred from the heated wall by convection and radiation, and heat was also transferred from unheated walls to the air flow by convection originated from their net radiation gain from the heated wall. The air flow rate, the inlet and outlet air flow temperatures, and local surface heat fluxes and temperatures on the heated wall were measured. The Reynolds number of air flow was from 2900 to 221,000 and Richardson number was changed from 0.006 to 90.6. The results showed that for walls with larger emissivity the total convection heat transfer was not deteriorated in mixed convection zone. Therefor a modified heat transfer correlation was developed for the aiding mixed convection in the asymmetrically heated channel considering both mixed convection and radiation. It predicted the experiment results with a deviation less than 18%.